Universities are in crisis.

Trump began his second term with an unprecedented assault on higher education, targeting universities through funding cuts, attacks on international students, and an escalating campaign against campus protests. This assault represents a furious backlash against the shifting political and ideological tides, especially the movement for Palestine, support for oppressed people, and, increasingly, a turn toward socialism.

These attacks build on years of conservative efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, eliminate Black studies and gender studies programs, and intensify attacks on transgender people, especially trans women. Yet the crisis of the university runs much deeper than Trump, who is better understood as an accelerant than as the cause. Universities cannot continue to function as they have and seem to be reaching an almost existential crisis.

Today, the university faces a profound structural crisis that includes declining enrollments, growing financial instability, and escalating federal attacks on public funding. The promise of upward mobility via a college education is an expensive lie for an increasing portion of students. As a result, universities are increasingly unable to fulfill their political, economic, and ideological functions as they have since the post–World War II period. The crisis is likely to deepen as artificial intelligence reshapes teaching, research, and the labor market.

Yet universities are essential to the bourgeoisie; they play a central role in reproducing U.S. capitalism. They credential the next generation of managers, professionals, and state administrators while helping produce the ideological consensus that underpins U.S. imperialism and capitalist rule. Universities often describe this mission as educating “democratic citizens.” But what this actually means is that they legitimize and reproduce exploitation and oppression, serving U.S. imperialism. As the Cornell rape case highlights, university institutions like fraternities play a role in strengthening a hyperpatriarchal masculinity, with the implicit or explicit support of universities. These institutions are more threatened by protesters for Palestine than by rapists precisely because of the investments these institutions have in Israel.

Yet the crisis in universities is both a product and a reflection of the broader crisis of U.S. capitalism; as U.S. imperialism declines and we enter a crisis of hegemony, the broader question is: What type of universities does capital want to impose for this new political moment?

And in this context, it is also an opportunity for the Left to define the type of university we want and need. We do not want to abolish the university, but we do want to change it at its roots. On one hand, universities, even in the context of capitalism, provide positive contributions to the working class, the oppressed, and society as a whole, from medical research to studies of marginalized and working people. Despite capitalist interests, universities have created important advances that have been beneficial for humanity– although those advances are severely limited by capitalist interests. Furthermore, universities have been and continue to be sites of class struggle, as well as centers of knowledge production that contribute to class struggle.

As people all over the country reject the “misery of the possible” and demand more and better — as expressed by the movement for immigrant rights and for Palestine, in the votes for DSA candidates in elections and more — we cannot just defend the university from right wing attacks. We must articulate a vision for the university we want and one worth fighting for.

We have already seen glimpses of a different kind of university. The movement for Palestine challenged the corporate university by demanding that institutions divest from genocide and sever their ties to militarism. But this movement was systematically repressed not only by Republicans but also by Democratic politicians and university administrations. That bipartisan repression left the movement on the defensive and politically disarmed just as Trump’s most sweeping attacks on higher education began.

We must defend the university from right-wing attacks — defend Black and gender studies departments, defend the right to protest on campus, defend against funding cuts, and more. But in this moment of crisis, we must clearly express that we are not fighting to return to the neoliberal, corporate university. Defending the university today requires more than resisting Trump’s assault. It also requires advancing a positive vision of higher education — a university by and for students and workers, whose knowledge is at the service of people, not profits.

In this article, I will argue that universities are not autonomous entities but reflections of the interests of capital in each moment of the political economy. Universities have taken different forms at different moments — they have been a bit more or less inclusive, a bit more or less authoritarian — but they have maintained their central function of serving the capitalist class and U.S.imperialism.  But universities are also central sites of struggle and have been shaped by the heroic struggles of students and faculty. And it is precisely class struggle that will allow us to change universities from a tool of capitalist reproduction to a tool for workers and oppressed people.

This article will be divided into three parts, which will be published separately. The first is historical: it will examine the making of the modern neoliberal university, beginning with the postwar boom. It will trace the university’s ties to capital. The second part will discuss the crisis of the university system today, a system that is failing on its own terms, both financially and as a space for critical thinking and inquiry. It has been deeply shaped and marked by the movement for Palestine, which shook the university system to its core and resulted in attacks from Democrats, liberal administrators, and Donald Trump. Trumpism did not create this crisis so much as it built on and deepened it. The crisis of the university is both a reflection and a product of the broader crisis of capitalism and the decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony. In this context of crisis, we must boldly propose a way forward.

In the final section, I will discuss the university we fight for: What do we want, and what are the possibilities for winning it in a context in which the capitalist crisis is opening up space for people to question everything and demand more?

This article is meant to provoke debate, discussion, and engagement. It is grounded in the firm belief that the struggle for the university — and for the future we want — is built through discussion, debate, and collective action — linked to the struggle against the entire capitalist system.

The Post–World War II University

Meant to educate the bourgeoisie, universities in their early iterations essentially only included wealthy white men. They were complicit in the slave trade and built on stolen Indigenous land. They have always played a role in the formation of the capitalist class.

But after World War II, there was an important shift with the mass expansion of access to higher education. Universities are part of what Gramsci calls the integral state — the organic unity of political society and civil society, through which coercion and consent are exercised. Universities are part of this field of civil society, helping produce hegemony even as, under specific conditions and through organized struggle, fractions of contestation can emerge within them. Universities became essential elements of the integral state in the 20th century as they became increasingly essential parts of American society, integrating and indoctrinating not only the highest class but also the middle class and sectors of the working class.

In the decades after World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented economic boom. In what was known as the Yalta order, the world was divided into spheres of influence, and U.S. imperialism became the dominant force in the capitalist world. Higher education expanded dramatically as a result of the GI Bill, which provided funds to returning soldiers to enter college, helping produce a new college-educated middle class. As Ellen Schrecker writes in The Lost Soul of Higher Education, “No longer a sanctuary for upper-class late adolescents with a soupçon of scholarship and scientific research thrown in, higher education embraced a new, more democratic mission. Now, thanks in part to the GI Bill, campuses welcomed a cohort of ambitious middle-class and lower-middle-class students seeking intellectual stimulation and social mobility.” At the same time, the professoriate expanded and became less genteel, more competitive, and increasingly professionalized.

There is a particularity about how the U.S. expanded higher education. Unlike much of the world, they did not create free or public universities. Rather, expansion occurred through a system of vouchers for individual soldiers. This set the stage for the individualized loan system that underpins today’s student debt crisis.

The government’s funding of hundreds of thousands of soldiers to go to college hinged on a very specific economic context: capitalist growth amid U.S. imperialist hegemony in ascent and a production boom after World War II, which had destroyed significant portions of the global means of production. Because the capitalists were making so much money, concessions to the middle and working class were possible. But the expansion of higher education was not just a concession; it was part of an imperialist project.

On one hand, universities trained the administrators, professionals, scientists, engineers, and managers required to reproduce an expanding capitalist economy and state apparatus. These trained professionals played a central role in a “talent” competition with the Soviet Union. As Lend and Rule argues, “the expansion of universities during the Cold War was part of a conscious project in which the university would build a labor force specifically designated for the wars to come.” Eisenhower’s National Defense Education Act funded the sciences and technology for the Cold War project and initiated the first federal loan program that provided low-interest loans for students in fields related to the military-industrial complex.

But on the other hand, the image of the university was equally essential to the Cold War project. From Hollywood to government speeches, the U.S. sought to promote capitalism as capable of providing both intellectual freedom and expanded educational opportunity, presenting the university as a neutral space of open inquiry while obscuring its central role in U.S. imperialist and bourgeois hegemony. A university education became central to the mythology of American meritocracy: study hard, earn a degree, and you too could live the American dream. In that sense, universities served as a safety valve for social tensions — the promise that everyone could make it if they worked hard enough — and provided ideological cover for the vast inequalities created by a racist capitalist system. Thus, the postwar university became a central institution of Cold War liberalism. Yet this expansion was inseparable from the university’s function as an ideological state apparatus, naturalizing liberal bourgeois democracy as liberatory and casting socialism as inherently authoritarian and irrational. McCarthyism purged much of the organized Left from academia, ensuring that the dramatic expansion of higher education occurred under the political and ideological hegemony of anti-communism.

Access to colleges and universities remained deeply unequal along racial and gender lines; Black soldiers did not gain the same access to higher education. The deeply racist university system resisted the integration of Black students, which set the stage for the civil rights and later, Black Power movement. Beyond that, the knowledge produced at the university often provided intellectual backing for racist and sexist ideology, which was combated in the movements of the ’60s and ’70s.

Despite attempts to make universities an arm of the state, both ideologically and materially, the realm of engagement with ideas and the contradictions of capitalism sooner or later creates dissent and class struggle. Indeed, universities became major sites of class struggle, where students questioned the relationship between imperialism and the racist capitalist system. In the ’60s and ’70s, campuses became a center of the movement against the Vietnam War, a hub of Black liberation organizing and a burgeoning feminist movement, and part of a global wave of student rebellion stretching from France in May 1968 to the Mexican student movement. In the U.S., students demanded that military recruiters and military research be removed from campuses and fought for more democratic governance of universities. As a result of struggles both on and off campus — from the civil rights movement to Black Power — students won affirmative action policies that would expand access to the university for people of color in the 1960s and even more so in the 1970s. Students occupied buildings, marched, confronted university presidents, and faced the police and, in many cases, white supremacists. Four students were murdered at Kent State by the National Guard, and two people were killed at Jackson State by the police.

The movement fought for and won the creation of Black studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and other programs centered on the histories and experiences of oppressed peoples. For many of the radical students who fought for these departments, the goal was not simply representation; it was to secure university funds to study the history of oppressed people with the aim of putting that knowledge in the hands of the community and creating structural change. It was also about challenging the university’s role in reproducing racist, patriarchal ruling-class ideology. In short, it was to confront the university’s role in the integral state, demanding a university that was not in the service of U.S. imperialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Activists imagined and fought for a people’s university that could serve oppressed and exploited people. As I will develop later, many of these departments have been significantly co-opted and employed by universities to justify oppression.

“Hedge Funds That Conduct Classes”: Making the Neoliberal University

In the late 1970s, the cycle of postwar economic growth came to an end, opening a new cycle of economic crisis. As Karl Marx argued, capitalism is prone to recurring crises because production is organized around the accumulation of capital and the pursuit of profit. The competitive drive to expand production can generate contradictions, including declining profitability and overproduction, that undermine the conditions for further accumulation. From this perspective, the crisis of the 1970s marked the breakdown of the postwar boom, as mounting pressures on profitability and international competition converged with oil shocks and other economic disruptions. But rather than falling into a depression and opening a new moment of world wars, neoliberalism emerged as part of an even stronger U.S. imperialist hegemony — and alongside it there arose a university system to serve this new moment.

There are several motors for the relative, but real, economic stability of the neoliberal period. Capital found its way out of the economic crisis by exporting capital and hyperexploiting workers in China when it opened its markets to capital, and in Russia when the USSR fell. In this context, not only did U.S. imperialist hegemony spread across the globe but a new “globalist” model of free markets and mass profits for U.S.-backed imperialism also emerged. This was linked to a stronger imperialist footprint in Latin America and the Middle East, seeking even more favorable conditions for U.S. capital.

On the domestic level, the ruling class embraced privatization, austerity, deregulation, and attacks on organized labor, extracting new profits from existing structures. Universities became new sources of profit. As Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades argue in Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, universities increasingly shifted from a “public good” to “academic capitalism.” Students became customers, research became even more directly tied to commercial interests, and administrators adopted the language of markets, efficiency, and competition.

Imposing this model required a combination of repression and co-optation of the movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Ronald Reagan made his political career from repressing campus protests, maligning universities and then instituting tuition hikes. As Lend and R**ule by Coalition Against Campus Debt argues, “Guided by [Milton] Friedman’s free market wisdom, Reagan recast free tuition — hitherto a beloved public benefit — as an unfair public entitlement that forced taxpayers to fund the reading habits of communists, gays and bra-burning peaceniks.” But these attacks on universities, and more broadly, the creation of neoliberalism, were not solely a Republican project. Rather, the Democratic Party was an essential wing of this project of increased privatization, attacks on the labor movement, and the neoliberal university based on increasingly high levels of debt. As Lend and Rule goes on to explain, “While Democratic and Republican legislators disagreed on the mechanics of the student loan market, both parties agreed on its basic premise: the ticket to higher education would be bought through borrowed money, not state funding”. In this sense, capital increasingly shifted the financial burden of higher education from the state to the individual student.

Whereas public universities were previously free or had relatively low tuition, high tuition rates were now imposed by states together with university administrators, creating a system of education based on massive student debt. This built on the structure created in the postwar period. The GI Bill created subsidies for individuals to attend college — not a system of free college — and neoliberalism built on this individualized system to create a college and university system based on debt. This created a built-in “disciplining” of students — after all, the threat of not graduating after having accumulated so much debt, or the threat of taking longer to graduate and incurring more debt, hangs over the heads of students. The United States remains one of the few first-world countries across the globe that does not provide a free university education. Today, U.S. students owe $2 trillion in education debt.

At the same time, university enrollments continued to rise, and the differences between public and private institutions deepened, as well as the those between universities that primarily serve working-class students and the most elite institutions.

The most elite universities have million- or even billion-dollar endowments that remain invested in stocks and are not touched by the university for their day-to-day functioning — not even to bail out the university from an economic crisis. Before neoliberalism, endowments were invested in “safe” bonds and seen as a way to keep the university afloat in times of crisis. With the rise of neoliberalism, there was a shift in the way universities were structured and funded; as federal and state money was increasingly cut, universities began investing their endowments in riskier stocks and bonds to achieve bigger and faster payouts. As the Students for Justice in Palestine position paper “The University and the Reproduction of Capitalist-Imperialist Society” explains, endowments were increasingly seen as a source of capital accumulation rather than as a safety net for universities. This connected universities’ basic fiscal viability to finance capital.

Public institutions, on the other hand, became saddled with debt, especially in the later years of neoliberalism. As Lend and Rule highlights, in the first 20 years of the 21st century, the amount of long-term debt held by public institutions tripled on a per-student basis. Public universities pledge future student tuition as a source of revenue for their promise to pay institutional debts. But even public institutions have investments; CUNY was forced to disclose their investments revealing $1 million invested in defense, weapons, and surveillance companies supplying or operating in Israel, as well as holdings in private prison companies.

Thus, in neoliberalism, public institutions became burdened with debt and beholden to the bond market, while private universities expanded their dependence on tuition and donors, with all universities becoming deeply integrated into finance and corporate capital. They are beholden to credit rating agencies, which can raise interest rates through a lower credit rating. This creates an incentive for universities to stifle student and worker activism.

Universities became increasingly run on low-wage adjunct labor — the gig workers of the professoriate. The AAUP finds that 68 percent of faculty members in U.S. colleges and universities held contingent appointments in fall 2021, compared with about 47 percent in fall 1987. Nearly half (48 percent) of faculty members in US colleges and universities were employed part time in fall 2021, compared with about 33 percent in 1987. They also find that women and “underrepresented minority” faculty members held adjunct appointments in greater proportions. Universities lower wages and extract more value from adjunct professors, who not only receive low wages but, in many cases, do not even have access to health care.

Davarian L. Baldwin argues that universities have become “hedge funds that also conduct classes” in his book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower.

A study by Inside Higher Ed provides an examples of this in their study of the “hidden corporate empire” of universities. The University of Minnesota–Twin Cities operates through a network of legally separate corporations that manage its financial assets, investments, and healthcare activities. Its $4.2 billion endowment is managed through the University of Minnesota Foundation, a separate corporation established in 1962, alongside related entities focused on investment management and real estate. Similarly, M Health Fairview is a healthcare partnership involving the university, its doctors’ corporation, University of Minnesota Physicians, and the independent Fairview Health Services. It blends the public and private, creating multiple private sector wings in order to extract profit.  There are even examples of university healthcare companies that have put money in casualty insurance in none other than the tax-dodging Cayman Islands.

Ellen Schrecker highlights in  In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, major urban universities “have become the dominant employers, real estate holders, healthcare providers, and policing agents in cities across the nation.” Universities have become powerful sources of capital accumulation, using not only students as sources of profit but also the city itself. As major employers, they depress wages for university workers as well as local workers outside the university. As major property owners, Baldwin argues, urban universities acquire and develop land, reshape housing markets, and accelerate gentrification. Through partnerships with municipal police and the expansion of campus security, they also help extend racist policing. Surrounding communities are viewed either as valuable real estate to be acquired or as populations to be surveilled and controlled.

The university’s expanding real estate footprint creates more profits. Universities have become some of the largest landowners in U.S. cities while paying no property taxes. In New York City, for example, Columbia University and New York University are among the city’s largest private landowners, yet their holdings are largely tax exempt. Their expansion transforms neighborhoods into investment opportunities, displaces longtime residents, and contributes to what Baldwin describes as “UniverCities.”

During the neoliberal period, the ties between universities and the imperialist interests of the state became even stronger. As the Students for Justice in Palestine position paper “On the University” explains,

Both the American ruling class and the standing civil government steer the university system to reproduce capitalist ideologies while simultaneously using the institutions themselves as engines for the technical and bureaucratic labor necessary to maintain imperial dominance. From the federally funded research labs producing technologies for war and surveillance to the monopolization and paywalling of knowledge behind the closed doors of university libraries, from the privatized endowment structure to the intentionally extractive tuition model that ensures indebted students cannot dissent without an existential risk to their livelihoods, the neoliberalization of the American university system has made it an enthusiastic arm of global empire.

Co-Optation of Social Movements

The neoliberal period created a new multicultural capitalism; while capital found new ways to extract profit based on debt and privatization, it draped itself in the promise of diversity, integrating and distorting the demands of the radical movements of the 60’s and 70’s, including the movements at universities.

While colleges and universities serve the military industrial complex, contribute to racist policing, and serve to create an elite divorced from the surrounding community, the neoliberal university also incorporated some of the demands and victories of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but largely on neoliberal terms. On one hand, the movements won new fields of study, including Black studies, queer studies, and more. Cultural centers for oppressed people were opened on campuses across the country. Universities became more diverse, accepting larger populations of students of color.

The movements of the ’60s and ’70s questioned the university’s role in racist, capitalist, and imperialist hegemony, but many of the changes to universities were meant to strengthen those very systems. More diverse administrators came to manage the same increasingly market-driven institutions based on debt, exploitation, and investments in imperialism. As Jodi Melamed argues in Represent and Destroy, “In contrast to the demise of racism that antiracist and anticolonial social movements had envisioned, … discourses of the Negro problem were instrumental for generating a new kind of antiracism that was productive for U.S. global ascendancy and leadership of translational capitalism.”

In this sense, many universities became essential mechanism for what Nancy Fraser has called “progressive neoliberalism,” which she defines as

an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives.

This Democratic Party political project used the face and language of multiculturalism to cover for Wall Street corporate policies. Universities increasingly became bastions of a wing of capital — the Democratic Party — that became more college educated and more diverse, and that dressed itself up in the veneer of multiculturalism to maintain brutal imperialist and capitalist politics.

While less so than in the postwar boom, universities still provided a path of upward mobility for small sectors of the working class and some middle-class stability. But more importantly, the myth of a meritocracy served as a neoliberal cudgel against working-class students and students of color, blaming impoverished communities and families for their own poverty. Any idea of public good was replaced by an ideaology of “personal responsibility.”

Universities also fashioned themselves as pillars of democracy that produced informed citizens and cultivated democratic participation, intellectual curiosity, and learning for its own sake.

For many students, university also functioned as a period of exploration, self-discovery, and identity formation. Clubs based on cultural, gender, and sexual identity proliferated; classes not only concerned with credentialing but with intellectual playfulness and curiosity were established: a class on Bad Bunny, the Science of Superheroes, the Philosophy of Star Trek, and more. Colleges were seen as a place to party, to have fun, and a “safe” environment to transition into adulthood, a commodified experience that colleges competed to provide.

Universities Have Always Served Capital

From the expansion of universities during the postwar period to the increased corporatization of universities, it is clear that in different moments they have served capitalist and imperialist interests in various ways. They are both a reflection and a motor for a specific moment of capitalism, whether it be the postwar boom or neoliberalism. They have consistently served to prop up the myth of a meritocracy and to simultaneously promote the idea that anyone can make it, while also suggesting that if you don’t make it, it’s your fault. At the same time, universities have been deeply shaken by class struggle — struggles that have both shaped universities in progressive ways and have also been co-opted in the service of capital.

This is not to say that universities have not produced important knowledge. Advances in fields such as medicine, for example, have saved lives; however, these advances are made for profit, not the common good. In fact, the advances in medicine and the system of patents makes billions for big pharma while denying life saving medicine for people all over the world. This is the contradiction of knowledge production in capitalism.

Universities have provided spaces to explore, study, learn, and understand more about the world and humanity, even within capitalism. But even these progressive elements are shackled and constrained by funding limitations, the thirst for profit, and the repression of leftist professors and students.

Yet the liberal project of universities, which has always been constrained by capitalist interests, is now under attack. Neoliberalism is ending, and the imperialist epoch of the postwar order is also in decline. Thus, universities are in crisis, which opens space for the Left to discuss the kind of universities we want and deserve. Our struggle must be to unshackle and democratically reinvent these institutions, as I’ll explore in the next part of this article.

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